One of Ireland's major contemporary poets

NYS Writers Institute, March 12, 1998

4:00 p.m. Afternoon Seminar | Humanities 354
8:00 p.m. Reading | Assembly Hall, Campus Center
Hosted by Writer-in-Residence John Montague

PROFILE
Paul Muldoon, winner of the Irish Times 1997 Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, is one of Ireland's major contemporary poets whose work is characterized by playful humor, inventive rhyme, and multi-layered structures of meaning. His poetry collections include New Weather (1973), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), New Selected Poems 1968-1994 (1996), and most recently Kerry Slides (1996). The New York Times has called him "one of the two or three most accomplished rhymers now writing the the English language" and characterized his work as "witty, oblique poetry that in the best post-modernist fashion focuses on the slippery equivocations of language itself."

Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland in 1951. He graduated from Queen's University Belfast where Seamus Heaney was his tutor. He worked as a radio and television producer for BBC Belfast before moving to the United States in 1986. He has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University since 1990. His next volume will be called Hay, and will feature primarily short, lyrical poems.

"Muldoon's is a poetry which sees into things, and speaks of the world in terms of its own internal designs and patterns." - Roger Conover, Eire-Ireland

". . .highlights Muldoon's witty, personal voice and inventive use of language, which often draws on daily routine and the topical." - The Irish Times on New Selected Poems 1968-1994

". . .quirky, off-beat talent for sudden revelatory flights from mundane consequences. . .He found very early a distinctively wry and deceptively simple-sophisticated lyric voice." - Rodney Pybus, Stand

"Muldoon's Irishness is demonstrably there. . .but the idiom of his poetry is international. . ." - The Irish Literary Supplement on The Annals of Chile

Books by Paul Muldoon

Additional Articles:
Writers Online Magazine Article

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.